php preg_split() to find text inbetween two words

how do I use preg_split() to grab the value between [item:1] and [/item:1]

$query= [item:1] my content [/item:1];

This isn't working

$match = preg_split('/[[item:1][\/item:1]]/', $query);

echo $match[0];

output should be just " my content ".

UPDATE:

$query = '
[page:1]you got page one content[/page:1]
[page:2]you got page two content[/page:2]
';

// parse fu开发者_JS百科nction
function parse_page($page, $string) {

    // VERY IMPORTANT STRIP OUT ANYTHING THAT WOULD SCREW UP THE PARSE
    $string = str_replace(array("\r", "\n", "\t", "\f"), array('', ''), $string);

    // test the string with the page number
    preg_match('@\[page:'.$page.'\](.*?)\[/page:'.$page.'\]@', $string, $matches);

    // return the match if it succeeded
    if($matches) {
        return $matches;
    }else {
        return false;
    }
}

// if page is set then try and obtain it
if(isset($_GET['p'])) {

    // set the returned parse value to a variable
    $page_dump = parse_page(($_GET['p']), $query);

    // check to see if the match was successful
    if($page_dump[1]) {
        echo $page_dump[1];
    }else {
        echo '0';
    }
}else {

    // parse page 1, if no page specified.
    $page_dump = parse_page('1', $query);

    if($page_dump[1]) {
        echo $page_dump[1];
    }else {
        echo 'no page =(';
    }
}

---

You don't want to split the string, you want to capture a pattern. For that, use preg_match, eg

if (preg_match('@\[item:1\](.*?)\[/item:1\]@s', $query, $matches)) {
    echo $matches[1];
}

Edit: Tested and working

Edit2: Added "s" (PCRE_DOTALL) modifier - http://www.php.net/manual/en/reference.pcre.pattern.modifiers.php.

You should really consider a better markup solution (see XML)